I think you'll find a significant number of people who decide not to enter competitions because their music just won't fit in that world.

When you have performers, there's the uniqueness of live performance and what performers do in concerts.

I noticed things in my computer music that were getting old, and I started to figure out that this has to do with the way the listener interacts with music.

I came to what I think of as the critical problem: the aging process of a piece of music. I noticed in the '70s that pieces I wrote would sound great the first time I listened to them and then on repeated hearings they sounded older and older until what seemed exciting and vibrant on first listening became stale.

Even today, I notice that some of my pieces are explicitly tonal; there are actually tonics and dominants. And then there are pieces that are not tonal. I tend to think that there's a dichotomy that has to do with the way pitches are structured.

I never thought that I would write orchestra music, but in fact I did write a group of orchestra pieces.

The experimentation that I do has a lot to do with tunes and pitches and ways that melodies are put together.